Airbase

I started Airbase, at least in part, as a response to something I saw too much of while running my first company: well-educated, truly intelligent people sacrificing huge amounts of their time doing low-value work. My talented finance team got bogged down in the chaos of approvals, time-consuming reimbursements, and repetitive manual bookkeeping tasks. What’s more, inefficient processes and inadequate tools meant that I was unable to get an on-demand, real-time view of what we were spending as a company. 

As I learned more, I came to realize that the status quo for AP in small and mid-market companies is broken, that the disparate systems for simply operating a business’s transactions were relics of technical limitations that no longer existed. Using the design-thinking concepts that are central to our product design approach at Airbase, we have taken a holistic view of the entire process and developed a deep understanding of our users' needs in order to solve the problem.

Spend management is a different way of thinking about spending company money. It frees up time from manual tasks and provides the tools for finance and accounting professionals to contribute insights, analysis, and strategic thinking, making them more valuable to their companies. An important innovation whose time has come. 

Modern companies must deal with a proliferation of payment methods and card networks. It's been an unfortunate status quo that has led to the unnecessary predicament of siloed AP solutions and manual processes, which modern spend management rectifies. These systems have been failing employees, managers, and leaders — especially finance teams — for far too long, all leading to a lack of visibility and control over company spending, difficulty managing and adjusting budgets, and delays in getting the books closed.
Modern spend management has its roots in improved access to digital payment mechanisms. And, at Airbase, it has grown out of an approach to problem-solving called design thinking that works to break with old patterns called schemas that bias solutions toward incrementalism.
At its core, design thinking revolves around developing a deep understanding of the people for whom we're designing products or services.

Airbase is the only spend management platform for small and mid-market businesses that brings together a comprehensive accounts payable system, a leading-edge corporate card program, and fully automated employee expense reimbursements into one system. With Airbase spend management, companies can replace Bill.com, their corporate credit card program, and Expensify.

Spend management is a different approach to, and a new way of thinking about, how companies spend money. It shifts the relationship between employees and the budget by building accountability into the workflows and supporting ownership of spending. It automates accounting and operational workflows to efficiently link payments to a company’s GL. 

Companies customize their approval workflows, and the system ensures the appropriate routing and compliance with even the most complex company policies for every payment type. Accounting automation tools for scheduling, amortizing, and categorizing transactions save time and provide a choice of paying vendors with virtual cards, physical cards, checks, ACH, and vendor credits, from one control center. With all non-payroll spend handled on one platform, actual spending against the budget can be viewed any day of the week. 

Finance teams in small and mid-market companies are underserved by existing process automation tools for accounts payable and expense management. The resulting cobbled-together solutions, inefficient processes, and manual workflows place strain on finance teams and can confuse or frustrate employees. Current practices can stymie growth, degrade decision-making, and relegate finance staff to manual work. Airbase gives companies the efficiencies they need to grow from the first funding round to IPO and everything in between. Airbase modern spend management unlocks trapped talent, provides visibility and control over all non-payroll spend, shortens the time-to-close, and provides better budget management.

Airbase is the only comprehensive spend management platform for early-stage to early-enterprise companies. While others are beginning to follow in our footsteps, Airbase continues to offer unmatched depth and breadth of features, plus flexibility on choices for implementation, from one to many aspects of the product. Unlike our competitors, we offer various card options, including Airbase, AMEX, and Silicon Valley Bank cards, that run on our platform. Airbase users often note our ability to "think like accountants" in our workflow designs, while our intuitive, friendly user interface is more pleasant and easier to use than the others.

With a growing demand for spend management in the marketplace, Airbase’s all-in-one platform has seen huge growth since its inception. 

Notable customers include Segment, Gong, Harness, Cameo, Docker, Segment, Heap, Mixmax, HackerRank, Productboard, Gremlin, OpenGov, and Eight Sleep. 

The considerable growth experienced by Airbase over the past year is perhaps more because of, and not in spite of, the current economic climate. For many mid-market companies, the pandemic-induced shutdown highlighted operational inefficiencies, lack of visibility, and insufficient control over expenses. Airbase’s platform addresses these problems by automating accounting and approval workflows through one platform for all types of payment, and by providing reporting for all expenses in real time.

During the pandemic, Airbase invested in increased engineering capacity, which has added additional functionality to its core product and solidified its place as the most comprehensive spend management platform available to pre-IPO companies. The most significant improvement is the continued build-out of a comprehensive bill payments function that fully rivals the legacy of Bill.com in accounts payable. With Airbase, corporate card spending (virtual and physical) and invoiced transactions are consolidated into one platform, where payments for invoices can be made via ACH or check. Other improved areas include real-time reporting on all spending (by employee and by department), support for all approval workflows via mobile app, Slack and Okta integrations, and both Apple Pay and Google Pay functionality.

2022 has kicked off at a vigorous pace of acceleration for Airbase, with the company also being ranked the #1 spend management company across multiple categories on G2’s 2022 Best of Software Awards. 

Testimonials:
Benjamin Pincus, COO/CFO at Expressable:
“We have a lean finance team, so tools like Airbase have been really instrumental in helping our department run more efficiently. Without Airbase, we’d be hard-pressed to finish everything we needed to on a weekly basis.”

David Coffman, VP Finance at Doximity:
“Virtual Cards have eliminated Doximity’s operational problems: Airbase’s lightweight pre-approvals keep our FP&A in the loop of every dollar before it leaves the bank.”

Michael Zhang, COO at Candidate Labs:
“I think for what it does on the spend management side, I largely consider it best-in-class. I haven’t seen anything come close to it.”

Jason Lopez, Controller at Lattice:
“Now, the Lattice finance team can view expenses in real time. That means we can respond quickly when we see something that doesn’t make sense. And, the approval control workflows ensure that fraudulent charges can’t slip under the radar. It was kind of a Wild West before Airbase.”

Our customer retention rate is ~90% based on data from Q2-Q4'FY22. The formula is 1 - churn %.

In addition to providing rich media instruction prior to customer onboarding, such as Quickstart webinars and Welcome videos, Airbase includes in-app guidance for the customer, such as feature tips, video instruction, and informational pop-ups, as well as direct links to articles in our online Help Center. The Help Center is directly accessible at any time via the Airbase Platform. We also conduct regular “15-Minute Tips & Tricks” sessions for ongoing instruction once customers actively use the Airbase platform.

We currently offer email support to our clients as well as a robust knowledge base to help support them.

For 2021 gross ARR $23,608K

The future looks bright for Airbase! 
The company recently celebrated its first virtual conference — Off the Ledger LIVE! — which featured a host of industry experts and a keynote from special guest Chef José Andrés. The event was hugely successful and helped generate some powerful topics for finance and accounting professionals. 
Airbase was also recognized by The Stevie® Awards as a Silver winner in The 20th annual American Business Awards® for Most Innovative Tech Company. The American Business Awards is the premier accolade for excellence in U.S. business, honoring organizations of all sizes and industries. 
You can expect Airbase will continue to double down on its mission to empower accounting and finance teams to manage their non-payroll spending and allow them to focus their time on activities of higher value. Through consistent approval workflows, accounting automation, and real-time reporting, we are giving accounting and finance teams the tools they need to manage their businesses today and in the future.